Source: www.nytimes.com
WASHINGTON, U.S., April 28, 2010: A badly fractured Supreme Court, with six justices writing opinions, re-opened the possibility on Wednesday that a large cross serving as a war memorial in a remote part of the Mojave desert may be permitted to remain there. The 5-to-4 decision provided a glimpse into how divided the court is on the role that religious symbols may play in public life and, in particular, the meanings conveyed by crosses in memorials for fallen soldiers.
“A Latin cross is not merely a reaffirmation of Christian beliefs,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in a plurality opinion joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. “It evokes thousands of small crosses in foreign fields marking the graves of Americans who fell in battles, battles whose tragedies would be compounded if the fallen are forgotten.”
Justice John Paul Stevens rejected that view. “The cross is not a universal symbol of sacrifice,” he wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. “It is the symbol of one particular sacrifice, and that sacrifice carries deeply significant meaning for those who adhere to the Christian faith.” Justice Scalia disputed that the cross represents only the Christian faith, only to have the counsel argue that he had never seen a cross in a Jewish cemetery. The comment drew a fiery rebuttal from an impassioned Justice Scalia.
Wednesday’s decision in the case, Salazar v. Buono, No. 08-472, settled very little. It did overturn a trial court’s order rejecting a Congressional solution to an earlier ruling that had said the cross, which stands on federal land, conveyed the constitutionally impermissible message of government endorsement of religion, in violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause. But the Supreme Court did not rule on the solution itself, and instead returned the case to the lower courts for reconsideration.